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#1 Neu-Erscheinungen Sachbücher Sozialwissenschaft
#20 Neu-Erscheinungen Sachbücher

Hier geht's zur Leseprobe

-> Kauft beim Buchhändler!

Funny enough - according to Art Review: it's a Graffiti writer. Puber 1. What Art Review doesn't know: he is Swiss.

The way whistleblowers and journalists like Bradley Manning, Rudolf Elmer, Richard Snowden and Julian Assange are treated puts some bad light on the world's most developed democrazies. At Art Basel I stumbled over this book.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians have fled to the small country of Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of these people are children. Just like little Sohah, 12, who lives in a Lebanese refugee camp and was photographed by my friend Moustafa Cheaiteli when she was showing her painting featuring a song about what she wishes for the future of Syriah.

Read more: A report on Syrian kids in Lebanon featured on humanitarian news site IRIN.

Candour. My fragrance featuring my initials.

I am getting more and more obsessed with fragrances and perfumes as a medium of communication.

Fragrances, tastes and smells are a purely physical thing. They will stay beyond the realm of virtualization and datafication for some more time. You can't see that, taste that, grab that digitally.

I like invisible styles.

Discovering the Comme de Garçons Series 6 Synthetic line almost ten years ago, I began to understand that perfums can open up totally new realms. Here is what they are about:

In 2004, Comme des Garçons have again declared war to natural components and launched the next series of anti-perfumes, Series 6 Synthetic. The smells of a big city are captured in a transparent plastic bottle in which you can observe a garbage bag.

I liked that idea. Really aggressive. I used it a lot but then it was sold out everywhere.


Synthetic Series. Rediscovered at Corso Como Milano recently.

In 2011 I visited the facilities of the world's largest manufacturer of smells and tastes, Givaudan. They produce almost 1/3 of all non-natural tastes and smells that are around us. I hadn't known such a powerful company even exists. I went to spend some time with some of their perfume makers and learnt, that perfumes are mostly based on stories, narratives. Moreover, like a musical composition, they change over time, as certain notes disappear more quickly then others.

Perfumes are great for storytelling, because the molecules a fragrance consists of directly attack your nervous system and the information goes straight into your brain without getting rationalized. Ask around and you will find that most people dont even have the words to describe smells. They won't be able to rationally reflect upon the stories told by fragrances. Stories becoming emotions.

That's why a lot of stories of fragrances are based on memories. Perfum makers go travelling, they take their notes, mix it up and that's it. That's why a lot of perfumes are backward oriented.

Most younger guys eg. currently smell like trees. Woody forrest notes. Maybe they want to appear grounded. Maybe this is how retro culture smells. Even though I generally like trees I don't like people to smell like trees.

Being hooked on that Synthetic Series I am asking myself all the time what would be a perfume that talks about new realities then?

Recently I went to visit Switzerland's most famous vendor of perfumes Osswald Parfumerie Boutique at the expensive shopping area of Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich. For some hours the friendly and amazingly well informed owner Monsieur Abt and I were looking for some news. There are some fascinating visions around, like the one of a new Dubai ruled world named 2022 Generation. Unfortunatley it was too elegant for me. I am german. I like Technik.

But then we found the perfume Candour. First of all it's an untold story. It's doesn't pull you back into time and memories. It's sweet, appears synthetic, a little gay. (Blog Entry Describing the smell and ingredients) I imagined a world beyond gender. Really colourful. I started imagining surfaces that are as smooth as chrome surfaces but made of some genetically engineered plants or so. Future. It's political too in a sense. There are specific olfactoric notes for cultures. Asians, Europeans and Arabic people have their typical tastes. But Candour doesn't take part in that game. It's post-racial, post-cultural. It's full of love for everyone. Still it is annoying to a lot of people. So it's not FOR everyone. Using Candour you are not just one tree in a forrest.

Looking at the ingredients of that apparently synthetic smell I discovered that behind the façades it features a lot of herbs, flowers and spices and even Maiglöckchen. So my synthetic dream perfume is literally rooted in reality.

No one I asked could figure what Candour was about. It creates a new identity. People associate it with me as a person now. Therefore maybe YOU shouldn't buy it.

Whilst this is not my piece of work, it closely relates to some of the stuff I tried to talk about and follow up when I was staying in Los Angeles in 2011 (see here). It's a book about how a guy named Stewart Brand planfully reframed the future. Just by propagating a picture of planet Earth as seen from above. The whole earth.

The Whole Earth is a museum catalogue that shows how some of the most influential ideas of our current day politics and private lives evolved out of Californian Counterculture. The (now closed) exhibtion at Haus der Kulturen der Welt followed the development of the Whole Earth Catalogue which is the missing link between the Grateful Dead, Wired Magazine and The Club of Rome. It traces the common roots of holism, techno-optimism, ecologism and cybernetics. Get it at Sternberg Press.

This is the flyer my friend designer and performance artist Zoé Blanc created for her performance (below). She is part of a performance group called Der Pfeil - which means "arrow". Thus the design for her flyer is based on just one arrow.

15 years ago in 1998 Wu Tang Clan associate Killah Priest released a song called Information on his album Heavy Mental. As a teenager I used to listen to it quite a bit. I found Killah Priest who connects everything from Aliens to Kabbala a funny conspiracy weirdo. But I liked the chill and dark atmosphere of the recording. I still do.

These days I am reading a lot about Big Data, information infrastructure projects and augmented reality applications. Plus I am reading the Wu Tang Manual. So I remembered Killah Priest's song Information. It features a description of his 1998 vision of future surveillance programs that struck me due to its parallels to the recently unveilled PRISM and Tempora projects.

I am sure Killah Priest must be hanging out in Brooklyn these days like I-Knew-It-All. If this young homie could see Tempora/PRISM coming in 1998 I guess we all must have known even at that time what is going on. Maybe this is one reason why the public stays so calm after what Edward Snowden has brought to the public. Moreover I take it as a lesson to put more trust in my current intuition.

Note: The song features one inacceptable anti-semitic byline which I despise but leave in because I don't like censorship.

LYRICS:

Information, no doubt, ya know, don't stop, don't stop, don't stop
Information, literature, thiefs on the run, where ya gonna hide
When the truth comes down on ya, you have to decide
Where ya gonna run to, where you gonna hide, information
When the truth comes down upon ya, you have to to decide
You have to to decide

Information, we have to come with the laser scanners and shoot ya
In supermarkets and department stores, direct mail houses
Were to record every single items we purchase, data about ya
Daily habits, and movements will flow into the b system
From spy satellites, constantly searching overhead
Watching us like we're squirting, a suburban 666 database investigator
Entire race heading for a cyber-space
Riots breaks inside an em-pire states, every move you make
Is recorded on tape, some of us are white
Prisoned behind gates, getting minature videos in a brief-case
Recording our every activities, indoors, outdoors, day & night
Obscenely invaded our policy, our prophecies
Star gazing, because Allah's far amazing, than any greater god or for pagan
Raised in synagogs of Satan, awakeing with the starvanation
Left beats, scared and shaking, god with education, my birth was foretold
From deep within my wardrobe, imbrase the cross-road, we once wore gold
But now we electric probes with silicon brains, sinthetic
All faces are strange, pathetic, check the eyes
A man can't even recognise his family
I blame it on humanity, for this insanity, spy satellites
The last data for life, theres no day or night, CIA
Take samples of my DNA, new borns, grow horns, placed in uniforms
Shipped off to the military, with they killed and buried...
Active tv sets will be watching us, just as we watched them
They will also report back to the beast at computer headquarters
Our telephone conversations will be automatically wire taped
And transcripted by the national security agency
Honesty, modesty, poverty, famine
Sons of Amman, deal with reprogramming, irus scanning
Breaking out of Satan's bondage, with long garments
Like we bionic, no longer paying homage, remember after 9-6
We wear biochips, now it's 9 fuckin', beware of armageddon
Bloodsheddin', and beheading, head on head collision
In the valley of decisions, we locked the beast in prison

Here ya gonna run to, where you gonna hide
When the truth comes down upon you, you will have to to decide
Where ya gonna run to, where you gonna hide
When the truth comes down upon you, you will have to to decide
When that time comes, you will have to decide, information, information
You will have to decide, information, where you gonna run to
Where you gonna hide, when the truth comes down upon you
You will have to decide, information, information
Information....

Ads say: "The Wu-Tang Manual is the definitive guide to the essence of Wu." In fact, Wu is a way of life created from elements of eastern and african american culture in a rough sort of ghetto cut-up in New York in the early 1990s. Here The Art of War meets Clarence 13X. Definitely, Wu Tang mastermind RZA has a lot of advice for his readers. Recommended. Sometimes valuable and oftentimes funny.



More on Wikipedia.

Jeff Hannemann of Slayer has died. Here is one of his songs from my favourite Slayer record "Reign in Blood".

Postmortem

[Lyrics & Music - Hanneman]

Funeral held for the depression of man
Holds the key to his own death
Entering a tomb of a corpse yet conceived
Tighten the tourniquet around your neck

Sifting away the debris of hated life
Cold touch of death begins to chill your spine
Seeking life beyond your perishment
Repeating words echoing through your mind

Chanting lines of blind witchery
To save yourself from extinction
Wanting to die is your reason to live
New life born from the oppressed

Taste your blood as it trickles through the air
Another casualty beyond the shadows you fall
Losing ground, the fate you feel it draws near
Fatality, reality, you await the final call

My sinful glare at nothing holds thoughts of death behind it
Skeletons in my mind commence tearing at my sanity
Vessels in my brain carry death until my birth
Come and die with me forever
Share insanity

Do you want to die!

The waves of blood are rushing near, pounding at the walls of lies
Turning off my sanity, reaching back into my mind
Non-rising body from the grave showing new reality
What I am, what I want, I'm only after death